Word recognition in two languages and orthographies: English and Greek

Chitiri, Helena-Fivi; Willows, Dale M.

doi:10.3758/bf03200859

Cited by 17 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Greek is considered to be a very transparent orthography (Seymour et al, 2003) with a highly consistent relationship between orthography and phonology; given the rules any word can be read accurately. As such, the pronunciation of written words is determined entirely by their spelling patterns and is independent of context (Chitiri & Willows, 1994). Two groups of younger adult participants, matched for age and education, who were monoscriptal in English or biscriptal in Greek and English, and two groups of older adult participants, matched for age and education, who were monoscriptal in either English or Greek, were recruited.…”

Section: Wimmermentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of letter position processing: effects of age and orthographic transparency

Ktori

Pitchford

2009

Journal Research in Reading

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This study investigated the relative extent to which developing readers (6-and 9-year-olds) of English (deep) or Greek (transparent) orthography exhibit serial and exterior letter effects in letter position encoding. Participants were given a visual search task that required detection of a pre-specified target letter within a random five-letter string. Stimuli comprised letters either specific to English or Greek, or shared by both orthographies. For native letters, all readers showed significant initialletter facilitation. In contrast, final-letter facilitation was shown only by English children. Furthermore, Greek 9-year-olds showed significantly more left-to-right facilitation than English 9-year-olds. These results suggest that letter position encoding is adaptive to the nature of the orthography acquired during reading development.The transparency (or depth) of an orthography refers to the degree to which a given language adheres to the orthographic rules that associate letters and sounds. Languages such as Greek and Spanish, which have consistent mappings between letters and sounds, are characterised by a transparent orthography. Languages such as English and Danish, which contain many inconsistencies in the letter-to-sound correspondences, are characterised by a deep orthography. Considerable research has shown that orthographic transparency affects the processes used to recognise and name visual words in both skilled and developing readers (see Ziegler & Goswami, 2005, for a review). In addition, recent research has shown that orthographic transparency also influences the initial stages of orthographic processing in adult skilled readers when letter identity and position are encoded . Skilled readers of English, a deep orthography, and Greek, a transparent orthography, demonstrated diverse patterns of positional biases in recognising pre-specified letter targets embedded within random letter strings during a visual letter search task, suggesting differences in the extent of utilisation of processes involved in early orthographic processing. The aim of this study was to explore the emergence of these biases with development by comparing visual search performance across readers learning to read in either English or Greek at two different ages (6 and 9 years).The effect of orthographic transparency on visual word recognition is not new in the developmental literature. Numerous cross-linguistic studies provide empirical evidence suggesting that the variation in the orthographic structure of languages affects significantly the development of visual word recognition skills and reading in general (e.g. Frith,

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Section: Wimmermentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of letter position processing: effects of age and orthographic transparency

Ktori

Pitchford

2009

Journal Research in Reading

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“…For instance, the orthographic depth hypothesis (Durgunoglu & Oney, 1999;Frost, 1994;Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987;Tabossi & Laghi, 1992) proposes that "shallow" orthographies involve the activation of phonological information before lexical access (i.e., prelexical or assembled phonology), whereas "deep" orthographies involve phonological activation at or after lexical access (i.e., postlexical or addressed phonology). According to this hypothesis, alphabetic languages with regular grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC), such as Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, and Korean, involve prelexical phonology or a greater reliance on phonological information, as each visual sound constituent of a word is converted into a sound letter by letter and then into a complete phonetic internal representation of the word, prior to semantic recoding (Chitiri & Willows, 1994;Cho & Chen, 1999;Frost et al, 1987;Tabossi & Laghi, 1992). In contrast, nonalphabetic languages without systematic GPC, such as logographic Japanese or Chinese, involve postlexical phonology, or a greater reliance on visual coding where one processes the visual representation of a word as a whole unit directly related to its meaning without phonological mediation (Biederman & Tsao, 1979;Hoosain, 1991;Huang & Hanley, 1994;Huang & Wang, 1992;Ju & Jackson, 1995;Leck, Weekes, & Chen, 1995;Weekes, Chen, & Lin, 1998).…”

Section: L1 Effects On L2 Word Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental Word Recognition: A Study of L1 English Readers of L2 Japanese

Chikamatsu

2006

The Modern Language Journal

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This study focused on developmental word recognition strategies used by first language (L1) English readers of second language (L2) Japanese. There were two proficiency groups of Japanese learners. The study considered whether or not word recognition strategies are developmental and whether or not L1 orthographic interference (i.e., involvement of phonological coding) diminishes as learners gain L2 proficiency. In Experiment 1, consisting of "contextfree" lexical judgment tests controlled by visual familiarity, the higher-proficiency group showed more visual reliance and diminishing L1 English orthographic effects at the beginning stages of instruction. However, this developmental difference was not apparent in Experiment 2, in which "contextual" passage reading tests were controlled by word visual familiarity. The higher proficiency learners showed a trend toward greater reliance on visual information; however, no significant difference in visual familiarity effects was observed between the two groups. These results imply that (a) the L2 word recognition strategy is developmental and reconstructed as proficiency advances, yet (b) automaticity takes time to develop, and (c) developmental effects may be involved differently between prelexical and postlexical phonology.

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“…As with Japanese, these syllable characteristics presumably allow children an easier task of phonological segmentation of their spoken language. In the written language, each letter's single sound remains relatively constant in different contexts (Chitiri & Willows, 1994).…”

Section: Greekmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of orthographic depth on learning to read alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic scripts

Ellis

Natsume

Stavropoulou

et al. 2004

Reading Research Quarterly

208

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he problem of how to represent spoken language in writing has historically been solved in different ways (Daniels & Bright, 1996;Gaur, 1992). One distinction is whether to "write what you mean" or "write what you say." Logographic systems such as Chinese and Japanese kanji use symbols to represent meaning directly and have no or comparatively few cues to pronunciation. Other writing systems represent speech sounds. The characters of syllabic systems such as the Japanese kana correspond with spoken syllables, whereas those of alphabetic systems correspond with separate phonemes. However, alphabetic orthographies vary in the degree to which they are regular in their representation of sound. The writing systems of Serbo-Croatian, Finnish, Welsh, Spanish, Dutch, Turkish, and German are on the whole much more regular in symbol-sound correspondences than those of English and French. The former are referred to as transparent or shallow orthographies in which sound-symbol correspondences are highly consistent, while the latter are referred to as opaque or deep orthographies that are less consistent because each letter or group of letters may represent different sounds in different words.Do these different writing systems affect the ways in which children learn to read? What, if any, are the effects of a written language's writing system on rate of literacy acquisition? The orthographic depth hypothesis (Katz & Frost, 1992) speaks to these questions because it postulates that shallow orthographies should be easier to read using word-recognition processes that involve the language's phonology. T 438 439THIS STUDY investigated the effects of orthographic depth on reading acquisition in alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic scripts. Children between 6 and 15 years old read aloud in transparent syllabic Japanese hiragana, alphabets of increasing orthographic depth (Albanian, Greek, English), and orthographically opaque Japanese kanji ideograms, with items being matched cross-linguistically for word frequency. This study analyzed response accuracy, latency, and error types. Accuracy correlated with depth: Hiragana was read more accurately than, in turn, Albanian, Greek, English, and kanji. The deeper the orthography, the less latency was a function of word length, the greater the proportion of errors that were no-responses, and the more the substantive errors tended to be whole-word substitutions rather than nonword mispronunciations. Orthographic depth thus affected both rate and strategy of reading.The effects of orthographic depth on learning to read alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic scripts ESTE ESTUDIO investigó los efectos de la profundidad ortográfica en la adquisición de la lectura en sistemas de escritura alfabético, silábico y logográfico. Niños entre 6 y 15 años leyeron en voz alta en el sistema transparente silábico japonés hiragana, en sistemas alfabéticos de opacidad creciente (albanés, griego, inglés) y en el sistema ortográficamente opaco de los ideogramas japoneses kanji. Los ítem fueron apareados según la...

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Word recognition in two languages and orthographies: English and Greek

Cited by 17 publications

References 51 publications

Development of letter position processing: effects of age and orthographic transparency

Development of letter position processing: effects of age and orthographic transparency

Developmental Word Recognition: A Study of L1 English Readers of L2 Japanese

The effects of orthographic depth on learning to read alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic scripts

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